On A Rugged Shore (2017)

Genre: Contemporary Jazz

I wrote this piece in 2017 at the same time as “It Is As If,” while I was taking the Gift of Jazz class “Dots on Lines” taught by CU faculty, Jeff Jenkins. Like the former composition, I dedicated this one to a remarkable individual.

In my life before retirement, I taught Advanced Placement U.S. History. I was always quick to point out to my students the influence of various best-selling books on American history: Common Sense by Thomas Paine, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson as prime examples. Although most textbooks spend only a couple of sentences on each, books like these have had an outsized effect on the movement of our history.

I was only vaguely familiar with the biography of Rachel Carson when I saw the 2017 PBS documentary on American Experience about her life’s work. I wasn’t born when her first book was published and I was only seven years old when Silent Spring shook the scientific world. I highly recommend this documentary, especially in this time, when people are cowing to would-be authoritarians and climate change denial is the orthodoxy. She is a shining example of what individuals can do when they stand up for what’s right against the prevailing currents of history.

I was so moved by her personal and professional struggles that I felt I had to write a piece dedicated to her memory. The title “On A Rugged Shore” seemed to perfectly encapsulate the hard life she built on the beautiful but rocky coast of her adopted Maine, where much of her work was done.

Here is an abridged outline of her biography:

In the early 1940s, the young Rachel Carson wrote a best-selling book called Under the Sea-Wind. It achieved popular acclaim for its clear, educational but poetic, writing. She used the proceeds from her book to purchase a seaside summer cottage on Southport Island, Maine. Living there with her mother, she spent time exploring the tide pools of that very rugged shore, thinking about the next books that she hoped to write. In collaboration with other biologists, her observations there led her to question the environmental consequences of the then ubiquitous use of the pesticide DDT. Although it was championed as a miracle for eradicating insect-born diseases, it also had the unintended consequence of poisoning the environment and killing aquatic life. This would lead to her controversial second book, Silent Spring, in which she envisioned what it would be like to wake up in Springtime without the singing of birds, poisoned by our chemicals. She was immediately maligned by the scientific community, facing many professional obstacles in bringing her conservation message to the public.

In the meantime, her personal life was no less rocky. When her sister died, she ended up having to take over the care of her niece. She was also diagnosed with breast cancer and spent the rest of her short life fighting the disease.

Silent Spring, published in 1962, became a catalyst for the early environmental movement. Earth Day in 1970 would emerge from these concerns. We probably would not be having a conversation about climate change at all without Rachel Carson, the first to publicly question the practices of large biochemical companies and agro-business on our health and well-being.

I envisioned the figurative tides of her life ebbing and flowing on the rocky coast of Maine as I composed this tune.

“On A Rugged Shore” debuted at the La Cour Bistro & Art Bar in Denver on March 19, 2017 (the same night as “It Is As If”) with Jeff Jenkins on piano, Kenny Walker on bass, Dru Heller on drums, Jeremy Wendelin on tenor sax and Jason Klobnak on trumpet.